How Your Small Business Website Can Get You Sued
Is your website a potential liability? Yes, it probably is.
Over the last three to four years, there has been an “explosion” of lawsuits and claims by disabled people, asserting that businesses’ websites (and, increasingly, their mobile apps) were not accessible to them because they were not up to code with Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, according to Charles Marion, a lawyer with Blank Rome LLP in Philadelphia.
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“The vast majority of claims are asserted by visually impaired individuals who use a ‘screen reader’ — software that enables the user to have content on a website read aloud to them when they move their cursor over the information on the website — but claim that they tried to access certain information on the business’s website using their screen reader but could not, because the website was not coded properly so as to be compatible with the screen reader,” Marion said. “Most of these lawsuits have been filed in California, New York and Florida, but we have seen an increasing number being filed in Pennsylvania.”
"How Your Small Business Website Can Get You Sued," by Gene Marks was published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on February 11, 2020.